Washington - Extremist movements consolidated in the United States in 1999, increasing their membership and using the Internet to disseminate their messages of racial hatred, according to a report by a prominent civil rights organisation.
The non-profit Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) told a press conference late Tuesday that while the number of extremist groups shrank by 15 percent in 1999, to 457 compared with 537 the previous year, the figure was misleading.
"We're seeing a marked consolidation and strengthening of certain larger extremist groups," SPLC's Mark Potok said.
A number of small local groups had dissolved to merge with larger, better organized ones, a SPLC survey found.
The neo-Nazi National Alliance, for example, increased its membership by 50 percent in 1999, to a total 1 500 members.
Many small skinhead groups were absorbed by Hammerskin Nation, the largest coalition of neo-Nazi skinheads in the world, and the survey found a similar consolidation of local units of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan.
The SPLC also said that many of the groups had shifted their emphasis to less "openly" racist positions, opposing immigration and affirmative action programmes of preferences for minorities, and in some cases espousing race superiority based on intelligence tests instead of skin colour.
It cited as an example the Council of Conservative Citizens, an organisation which includes among its members many lawmakers from southern US states.
The center did find that "some of the decline in hate groups is probably real," and quoted a California neo-Nazi leader, Tom Metzger, as saying that "all membership organisations are either treading water or losing ground."
But while the anti-Semitic group Christian Identity lost members, racist neo-pagan movements attracted unprecedented support among young people, especially among the prison population, SPLC research showed.
In addition, the number of Web sites dedicated to the propagation of racist and anti-Semitic themes doubled in two years, to 305 sites at the end of 1999, the centre found.
"Many extremists retreated into cyberspace," said the SPLC's Joe Roy, noting that the Internet had given increased propaganda reach to individuals with no organisational affiliation.
The survey also described the emergence of radical right groups taking up issues traditionally of interest to the left, the environment, animal rights, and economic globalization N such as The American Front and the American Coalition of Third Positionists.
Such groups represent "a remarkable convergence of traditionally 'left' and 'right' political doctrines. They are a volatile mix that could define the shape of extremism in the new millennium," Roy said.
Based in Montgomery, Alabama, where it began as a small civil rights law firm in 1971, the Southern Poverty Law Center is an organization working to combat racism and anti-Semitism. - Sapa-AFP